“Cooper, Coleridge and Re-Imagining a Native Cosmology”Alfred Kentigern Siewers, Bucknell University

18th International James Fenimore Cooper Conference,July 13, 2011, SUNY Oneonta

Charles S. Peirce and semiosis

Sign ---- Object (environment)

\ /

Interpretant (law, meaning, tradition)

Natural laws as theophanies, as origins and purposes of creatures

John Scottus Eriugena (9th c. Irish philosopher, a favorite of Coleridge):

1. Wunnégin—relationality (~apophatic ascesis)2. Logic of place

“One of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels, concerning whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or more.” (Coleridge’s gloss, 1817, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)

“The spirit who bideth by himselfin the land of mist and snow, He loved the bird that loved the manWho shot him with his bow.”

Eriugena “expressly describes creation as manifestation…epiphany”--Coleridge

manitous of the Manitou logoi of the Logos

logos=word, discourse, purpose, reason, speech, harmony, story(Dionysius the AreopagiteMaximus theConfessorEriugenaColeridge)

“I look upon him as the most of a man, who acts nearest the right, Hurry. But this is a glorious spot, and my eyes never aweary looking at it.”

“He felt a portion of that soothing of the spirit which is a common attendant of a scene so thoroughly pervaded by the holy calm of nature.”

“To my eye it is such a solitude as one might open his whole soul in, and fear no one to disarrange his thoughts or his worship.”

“Hurry Harry thought more of the beauties of Judith Hutter, than of those of the Glimmerglass, and its accompanying scenery,”

From The Deerslayer, on the source of the Susquehanna River:

“God made us all, in the main, much the same in feelin’s; though I’ll not deny that he gave each race its gifts… I do not pretend that all that white men do is properly Christianised and according to the lights given them; for then they would be what they ought to be, which we know they are not; but I will maintain that tradition, use and colour, and laws make such a difference in races as to amount to gifts…”

“I hold to a white man’s respecting white laws, so long as they do not cross the track of a law comin’ from a higher authority, and for a red man to obey his own red-skin usages, under the same privilege….Different gifts, but only one natur’.”

Innenwelt and Umwelt -- Jakob von UexküllInner and outer meaningful environments of organism or species

Semiospheres -- Juri Lotmanrealms of meaning encompassing many Umwelts

Ecosemiosphere--Natty Bumppo’s “gifts” and “nature” melded in the woods?semiosphere(s) attached to an eco-region

1. Wunnégin /relationality (apophatic ascesis)

--Overlay landscape: Atlantic archipelago/Somerset (Coleridge)Lake Glimmerglass (Cooper)

--Metonymic symbolism: The albatross, the forest, etc.

2. Logic of place

--Plexity of Time: The “ancient” mariner and Natty Bumppo;primordial polar spirit and Lake Glimmerglass/forest

--Ethos of In-dwelling: Empathy toward native cultures in Cooperand toward the sea and countryside and their denizens in Coleridge

Native cosmologies in the Leatherstocking Tales and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

(following Pratt, Heidegger, Maran and Peirce)